Installation bugs, kinks in new features like Web apps hamper promising release.

Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical's six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company's current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it's a bit of a rocky ride.

The product's development lineage is important to note from more of a business/adoption side perspective. The release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in April was Canonical's fourth long-term support product and signaled the end of one full two-year development cycle. Quantal Quetzal is the first standard release on the road to pushing out Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in Spring 2014 (undoubtedly to be codenamed "Uber-rocking Unicorn" if the pattern holds), and it sets up themes and directions which will mature over the next two years.

Standard releases aren't terribly different from the bi-annual LTS products, though they tend to be slightly less conservative in code offerings. The Ubuntu development community lets off the brakes a little and sticks some shiny back in.

Ubuntu 12.10 is no exception, so make no mistake—there's some shiny goodness in this release. We'll get into what makes this a decent desktop and even more decent server release. But there's a little tarnish mixed in, too, and that makes Ubuntu 12.10 less special than previous editions.

Installer crazy

After writing about Linux for a little over a dozen years, I've come to the conclusion that writing about the installation of any Linux distribution should be banned from any review article. By now, Linux has gotten pretty good at installation on a variety of machines whether using thumb drives, discs, or the over-the-network approach. It's gotten so good that all you should have to say about installation is that you stick the media in, boot the machine, and a few steps later, you have a working example of distribution X.

That almost happened with Ubuntu 12.10. A showstopper bug at the very end of the install process on our first test machine broke the entire installation. A second test installation on VirtualBox crawled through the space-time continuum and ultimately failed. The only installations that performed flawlessly were a re-install on the first test machine (after fixing the boot problem that hung up the first go-around) and an express install that Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac ran through without a hitch.

To say this was a little surprising is an understatement. Leaving off the problem with VirtualBox for a moment (because that's not a typical use-case scenario), the fact Ubuntu could not be installed on a mainstream Lenovo machine due to a bootloader problem is a bit ridiculous.

This issue was wholly unexpected, that's for sure. The designers at Canonical have put together one darned fine installer in Ubiquity, with a slick and easy-to-follow process that experts can just zip through and beginners can step through without too much jargonism. We knew things were good when the Installation Type screen in Ubiquity spelled out in plain English what the system wanted to do with my hard drive.

On the virtual and physical installations, we basically opted to blow away our existing hard drives. But clicking the Something Else option delivered us to an easy-to-understand partitioning model that most intermediate users could follow if they wanted to set up a multi-boot system or a separate /home directory partition.

Everything in Ubiquity is about making Ubuntu easy to install. There's no package management at all, which can be either a boon or a curse. The only choices you get on what you want to install? You decide whether to add on the third-party proprietary software such as the Fluendo MP3 plugin that lets you play MPEG-3 files (which you should do unless you have a beef against such software). You also have a choice to update any packages that need it during the installation. This is a judgment call: Do it now or do it later. If you have the time, we'd recommend "now" so you have the most-secure packages on your system once installation is complete.

Another choice we suggest you make, especially if you are using a portable machine, is opting in when the installer asks if you want to use full-disk encryption. This is a new option in the 12.10 installation (previous releases forced you to go through extra steps or use the alternate install image in order to get full disk encryption working). This means you will have to set up and remember a machine-specific password, but for peace of mind, it's worth the effort. If your machine walks away, at least you won't have to worry too much about someone casually searching your system's files.

The inclusion of full-disk encryption as such an easy installation step is a pretty big deal for a Linux distribution. Its appearance in Ubuntu's Ubiquity installation is in no small part due to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—the organization lobbied for full-disk encryption in Ubuntu back in May 2011.

That's assuming your installation is complete, mind you. After swimmingly pacing through the installation on a Lenovo G570 laptop that only had openSUSE 12.2 on it beforehand, things came crashing to a screeching halt when Ubiquity was unable to load bootloader on the main hard drive. That's the kind of problem common at the turn of the century, not in 2012 with arguably one of the most advanced Linux distros on the market. Yet there we were, staring at an error message telling us there would be no joy in Linuxville today.

This kind of error is aggravating—not just because it's outrageous to see it. To understand and fix this issue requires the kind of technological expertise that Ubiquity and the rest of Ubuntu's approach was trying to avoid in the first place.

It was not immediately clear what happened during our installation: the error message would not install on the default partition or any other partition we selected. The literature found on various community sites suggested the problem has to do with changes Windows 7 makes to the master boot record (these supposedly make Ubuntu's bootloader, GRUB, hard to load). In our case, it seems this problem also extended to machines on which Windows 7 has been completely replaced by other Linux distros, which can install themselves without problems. This bootloader issue is not a new problem, either: a quick search found many examples back to Ubuntu 11.04. This raises a third bone of contention—if this is not new, why hasn't it been fixed?

Fortunately, a fix is available. There's a great tool called boot-repair. When installed and run, it very quickly goes in and repairs the GRUB bootloader so that it can operate. To get it, boot to the Ubuntu LiveCD again and this time click "Try Ubuntu" rather than "Install Ubuntu."

In the Dash field, type Terminal and get ready to type these commands, pressing Enter after each line. (Because that's what every new Linux user should have to do, right?)

When the first add-get-repository command runs, you will be prompted to say "yes" or "no" by the run sequence. Just type "Y" to keep the program going when asked. After running the last command, the Boot Repair application will open.

The hard part is over. Click the Recommended repair button in Boot Repair and let the application go through its process (it's just a few steps you can click through easily). Once completed, reboot the system and Ubuntu will start normally, bootloader intact.

While it is possible to use Ubuntu this way, extra files and language packs that would have normally been unloaded had Ubiquity been allowed to finish the job were still present on our initial installation. If you want everything ship-shape, your best bet is to step through the installation again.

Ideally, all of this rigmarole will be avoided and your Ubuntu 12.10 installation will run smoothly. Since it was so easy to use and did the trick, we would like to recommend that the functionality of boot-repair be incorporated into Ubiquity in future versions.

Clean-installing Ubuntu 12.10 on the test machine with no encryption and no software updates took 12:24. Grabbing all the software updates and applying full-disk encryption to the entire hard drive (including free space to really lock the disk down) took just a smidge longer, clocking in at 17:08. Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on how many updates Ubuntu has to get and install.

117 Reader Comments

Your issue with the bootloader made me chuckle. I had a similar one (to blank screen though) a couple of years back, grub2 issue. After 3 week-ends emailing back and forth with the dev, I went back to Windows on that PC.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 at home and I like it, but I like it stubbornly, despite so many shortcomings. There are so many things that just boggle the mind with Linux development in general and Ubuntu in particular, and with 12.10 it just feels like less substantial changes. It almost feels like in its current state the OS has stalled in a period I'd compare to pre-ICS Android. It is fugly. I don't understand why this isn't repeated time and time again in all reviews.

Why can't Shuttleworth and whoever works on Ubuntu pay attention to icons, colors, themes, and the general design? When I boot the system I feel like I am in the nineties, and it does not help that there are custom themes that I can install. Look at that space between folders, no other normal operating system has that ridiculous gap. The maximize/minimize/close window buttons are ridiculously ugly. And don't get me started on the puke-invoking looks of LibreOffice, thank god there is Google Docs. The situation was equally terrible with Android in all versions prior to Duarte's arrival and ICS, but in just a year or so, look at what a drastic change happened. Can Ubuntu get a similar redesign? Or is it just me?

Well, I'm glad I wasn't the only one who hit that bootloader problem and found boot-repair helpful---if that tool isn't in the default ISO, it should be The installer would be improved if it would present a summary of what it's about to do, including where it's about the install the bootloader, and then give you the option to change it. As it stands, you don't get that information until too late.

It's also fearsomely glitchy to use once it's installed. I've been using Ubuntu since 6.06 (a good release) and use 12.04 daily (which is another winner) and this one gave me more trouble that 9.04, 9.10 and 10.10 _combined_. I'd like to contribute more to testing and web apps are well done, but the bugs are spectacular.

There's a lot of good, here, but it seems like these interregnum releases are getting beta-/preview-quality at best.

My experiences, the good:- Web app integration is very neat.- Unity is more polished/stable.

The bad:- Web app integration installation is shaky.- apt-get purge unity-lens-shopping- Hotkeys bound to Terminal for example (Ctrl+Alt+T) won't work unless focus is on desktop, worked fine in 12.04.- Empathy is getting more and more unusable release after release.

The ugly:- Logoff from a Windows 7 virtual machine, aborts the VM.- Software Center is still a major PITA to use, slow, constant reloads.- mdadm lost one of my disks in my Raid-6 array, had to rebuild.- Nouveau (open source NVidia driver) crashes daily.- ATI proprietary drivers don't work when installed from app store. - NVidia proprietary driver won't work unless you get the fresh version from NVidia and install it manually.- LightDM can take a CPU core to 100% and stay there.

12.10 feels like a very early beta.

My system is an AMD Phenom II 1090T rig with 880G chipset and built in ATI video card (but I constantly juggle between that and an adding a NVidia 8400 GS, depending what video driver works).

Ubuntu 12.10 - the first time I downgraded. My installation experience was NOT a good one. First off, my three year old Wal-Mart special Acer laptop's ATI chipset was not supported by 12.10. Why? It's just a driver guys. Secondly, I didn't have LVM available under the "Something else" install. Forget encryption too. Not a good way to sell me on your new OS. Finally, there were numerous "Sorry, Ubuntu experienced a failure" messages.

This release feels a bit unpolished. Let's hope the April LTS release takes these numerous shortcomings and fixes them.

Editor Moonshark says:

You can chalk me up as another not too happy 12.10 user - In my case I've experienced problems with the broadcom driver acting up (which I last had a problem with in '08), the catalyst drivers acting up with the GPU working at higher temperatures than under 12.04(although this could be caused by AMD and not Ubuntu). What irks me the most,however, is that you still have to jump through hoops to make Windows,UEFI and Ubuntu play nice on the same drive - In fact, I've practically given up hope that this'll be fixed and am just running 12.10 off an external USB3 drive. Still,not a too horrible OS for a voluntary 10$ donation

I used to be a user of Ubuntu but have since migrated to LinuxMint. The thing that annoyed me with every upgrade was that it seemed they spent most of their time redising the look yet again. I know they added features but it just seems liked more and more Eye candy.

My big questions (which I've been asking since around 11.04 or 11.10) are:

1) Can I change the fonts (size, family, etc) in a fresh install without having to install unsupported third-party tweak tools? Note that using the accessibility slider to global scale all fonts up/down isn't the same thing.

2) Have they fixed the 1 pixel wide window borders in the default themes for Unity2D/Gnome fallback so that it is possible now to resize a window using the mouse without needing pixel perfect precision? I'm well aware of alternate methods for resizing windows that both involve using the keyboard or more clicks than should be necessary. Manually hacking themes in a desktop focused distro isn't something I should have to do.

Thank you very much for a great review. My team currently uses 11.04 as our officially supported development environment (I say official because a few use later versions). We are planning on moving everyone to 12.04 but stopped short thinking 12.10 might be better. I think we will go back to our original plan.

I'm pretty new to the Linux side of things, and I really appreciate how much progress Ubuntu has made in just installing and getting most basic things working. However, I'm surprised how difficult it has been to update my graphics drivers. AMD provides a package and apparently it's supported by Ubuntu, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to get it working properly. If the Ubuntu software center provides such an easy way to install applications, why not also to update drivers?

I'll probably have another go at it because I'm really looking forward to migrating to Linux-based computing when Windows 7 becomes too long in the tooth, and presumably Microsoft has fully sold out to greedy app-based computing.

I was going to go back to Unity after not being entirely impressed with Mint, but looks like I should just go back to 12.04.

Is there an easy way to jump onto the newer branch of applications without upgrading the OS? Meaning, let's say an application is at version 10, and then 10.1, etc. And maybe version 11 is what starts out in Ubuntu 12.10.. How do I get my application to jump up to the next level?

Is there an easy way to jump onto the newer branch of applications without upgrading the OS? Meaning, let's say an application is at version 10, and then 10.1, etc. And maybe version 11 is what starts out in Ubuntu 12.10.. How do I get my application to jump up to the next level?

Some application developers maintain separate PPAs for their apps, so that you can grab the latest stable or dev versions directly from them. Also, Canonical will do backports of some apps, taking the current versions of apps from the latest Ubuntu repos and making them available for older versions of Ubuntu.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 at home and I like it, but I like it stubbornly, despite so many shortcomings. There are so many things that just boggle the mind with Linux development in general and Ubuntu in particular, and with 12.10 it just feels like less substantial changes. It almost feels like in its current state the OS has stalled in a period I'd compare to pre-ICS Android. It is fugly. I don't understand why this isn't repeated time and time again in all reviews.

Why can't Shuttleworth and whoever works on Ubuntu pay attention to icons, colors, themes, and the general design? When I boot the system I feel like I am in the nineties, and it does not help that there are custom themes that I can install. Look at that space between folders, no other normal operating system has that ridiculous gap. The maximize/minimize/close window buttons are ridiculously ugly. And don't get me started on the puke-invoking looks of LibreOffice, thank god there is Google Docs. The situation was equally terrible with Android in all versions prior to Duarte's arrival and ICS, but in just a year or so, look at what a drastic change happened. Can Ubuntu get a similar redesign? Or is it just me?

I agree Canonical needs to revamp the Ubuntu UI, and imo forget about the sidebar, too. Make it easy for people to get into it, not harder. Don't be the Windows 8 of the Linux world. They need to do this before they start developing their tools and design resources for the SDK, and before 14.04 LTS launches. They also need to make the new interface flatter, and work a lot better on low-end chips, like ARM chips. If I were the CEO of Canonical, these things would be at the top of my list right now. They also need a redesign of their Software center.

Another thing would be helping and encouraging Valve, EA, Blizzard, Adobe and a few other popular software makers to port their programs to Ubuntu. Once they bring popular software to Ubuntu, and they make the OS more intuitive and prettier and higher performance, I would gladly recommend all my non-techie friends to use Ubuntu instead of Windows. Until then, I can't do that.

I've used Kubuntu 12.10 for about a month and it's been a very solid release. I'm getting better results with the Muon package manager than I did under 12.04. No major interface changes. But, if you're more interested in stability and familiarity I'd recommend it.

Just got a new Lenovo Thinkpad X220t and after giving up on Win8 I decided to give Ubuntu a try. I have tried Linux every few years and never stayed with it. This is the first time I'm somewhat happy with it.

Installed without a hitch but I need to play around with some script to get the screen rotation to work properly and I haven't gotten round to it. Should take 10 min.

Installed netbeans but the one from the repository is too old so I had to fetch a .deb and that went without a hitch. Same thing with Oracle VirtualBox. MySql WorkBench from repository works fine.

Installed skype from repository and it has so far been the only unstable program on my machine.... just like on my Win7 computer. Empathy works ok for GoogleTalk but I keep gmail open most of the time so if someone contacts me, they pop up in the browser. If I initiate the conversation (in empathy) it stays in empathy.

Installed Dropbox, no problem. Installed InSync for my Google Drive, no problem. Opera from a .deb and had to fiddle around a bit to get the Java plugin to work (internet banking).

So far it has been a joy to work with. Boots up really really fast (on par with Win8 I think) has not given me an ounce of problems. Only bug seems to be RythmBox ignores my hardware volup/dwn if I have it open while pushing them.

Can you please explain about LVM (Logical Volume Management) option in disk partitioning? Is there any down side? Is it recommended? Thanks in advance.

It depends on what you want to do. If you have one hard disk and you plan on always having one hard disk, you probably don't need to worry about it. If you want to do some fancier stuff with multiple disks, then it might be worth looking into.

I took the plunge and upgraded to 12.10 from 12.04 on the release day.

Since then, my Nvidia graphics card drivers have crashed the computer on at least 16-17 occasions, out of the blue, sometimes when doing absolutely nothing,

I still to this day, cannot install the experimental or post-install-updates drivers from Nvidia (nvidia-current-stable does work however), every time I reboot after an installation, I simply cannot get the X server to start. I have a bugging feeling it's a motherboard and ACPI problem, but I never seem to get far enough with anybody with respects to bug reports and such.

I loved the IM integration on previous releases of Ubuntu, but now I just hate Empathy with such a passion that I would love to use anything but it. It's not the web authentication or anything, it's just feels like it's gone backwards rather than forwards since 12.04.

I am in agreement with a lot of posters about the side-bar. I find it a necessary evil for now, until something better comes along. For those people unhappy with it though, there is always Gnome3 or KDE. I for one, will certainly give KDE a shot to see if it's any better than Unity.

I certainly don't intend to abandon Ubuntu for now, but I'd certainly be tempted if I could get the current Nvidia drivers to work on Debian.

I am in agreement with a lot of posters about the side-bar. I find it a necessary evil for now, until something better comes along. For those people unhappy with it though, there is always Gnome3 or KDE. I for one, will certainly give KDE a shot to see if it's any better than Unity.

This comment would make more sense if they were in competition with each other. Arch and Ubuntu are meant for completely different purposes. Ubuntu is for the person who just wants a simple way into the world of Linux; Arch is for the person who has the time and patience to get their hands dirty in the command line.

I just installed 12.10 on my laptop (previous 12.04 install on there was utterly broken, and it seemed like a good time to start from new).

The installer spotted the old Ubuntu install, and offered to upgrade, or to just install over the top. I chose the re-install as I had nothing I wanted saving.

As soon as I made this choice, the installer starts installing. No further questions about full disk encryption (which I'd like to have turned on) or anything like that. And then despite claiming to install 'over the top of the old ubuntu', it went ahead and trashed my boot loader, so it nuked my Windows install on the same laptop. Thanks, ubuntu! This is exactly the kind of behaviour Windows installs had ten years ago.

I love Linux because it's so clean, minimalistic, lets me work with a beautiful shell (zsh), Git, LaTeX, Java, Scala, Python, etc along with consumer use with Google Chrome and IM.

Most of the "features" that Canoncial adds are just junk. For example, I'm on a team doing Java/Hadoop cloud development. I go to Hadoop user groups. Lots of people use Puppet for system configuration management. I've never even heard of anyone interested in juju or Ubuntu's add-ons.

I do like the driver updates and such in new Ubuntu releases. 12.10 includes new nvidia drivers that completely fix auto-switching to external monitors on connect/disconnect but break 3D acceleration. Whatever.

I was disappointed that python 3 still doesn't support popular libs like matplotlib.

I am fine with the Unity launcher. I don't understand the push back to it. I'm usually in a shell or a browser or a text editor of some kind anyway.

Truthfully, we need to strike biweekly, bimonthly and biannually from our collective lexicons, they are imprecise terms that deal with precise timeframes. If you mean twice a year, say "twice a year." If you mean every other year, say "every other year"

Seems like just yesterday I was reading Ars' review about 12.04. Now 12.10 comes out. Good lord, I used to keep up with Ubuntu quite a bit, but every since Unity came out, and they've been trying to copy MS' "one desktop to rule them all (across all device types)" I've just steered away from them and haven't looked back.

I had to choose a linux distribution last week for a family member. Unity and Gnome 3 really turn me off, so we're trying Linux Mint's Nadia release, using the Mate interface, and I really like it. Absolutely no problems installing on new hardware (an Asus Zenbook Prime).